And beside me was Sarah. Except Sarah’s face was softer now, like someone had smeared Vaseline across the lens. Her features were there, technically, but the details had gone fuzzy. The exact shade of her eyes. The shape of her smile. The way her hair curled at her temples.
Emma was worse. Emma was barely there at all. I could see the shape of her, young, bright, grinning at the camera with the intensity of a girl who knows she’s being photographed, but the rest of her was fading. Dissolving. Like an overexposed print left too long in sunlight, like a memory bleaching out at the edges.
My hands were shaking.
“Miss? That’ll be eight seventy-three.”
The cashier’s voice came from somewhere far away. I shoved the Polaroid back into my purse, fumbled bills onto the counter with trembling fingers. Too much, a ten and a five, but I couldn’t make my hands count properly.
“Keep the change,” I managed.
What did this mean? That I would never meet Sarah now? That Emma would never be born because I was here, in 1987, changing things that weren’t meant to be changed? Or was it simpler than that, was I just forgetting? Was every moment I spent building this new life erasing the old one from my memory?
I tried to remember Emma’s middle name. I’d known it, once. I’d helped Sarah pick it, arguing for hours about family names and meanings and how the full name would sound when Emma inevitably got in trouble at school.
Gone.
I tried to remember her laugh. The sound of it, bright and sudden, the way it could fill a room.
Gone.
I tried to remember the last thing she’d said to me, that final conversation before the world ended and rewound and dropped me here in a body that wasn’t quite mine anymore.
Gone.
“Maggie?”
Jack’s voice, warm with concern. His hand on my elbow, steadying.
I grabbed my bag of books from the counter. My movements were jerky, mechanical.
“Ready to go?” I asked. My voice sounded off. Too bright. Too forced.
He was watching me with that gaze, the one that saw everything and filed it away for later analysis. I could tell he knew something was wrong. I could also tell he was choosing not to push.
“Sure,” he said. “Let’s walk by the river.”
Outside, the afternoon had turned golden, late winter sun slanting through bare branches. Jack took my hand like it was the most natural thing in the world.
I nodded, not trusting my voice.
The photograph sat in my purse like a stone.
Jack
Something had happenedin the bookstore. I didn’t know what. Maggie’s face had closed up between one moment and the next, her easy joy replaced by something that looked almost likegrief. She’d recovered quickly, she was good at recovering, but the lightness from earlier was gone.
We walked along the Charles, and she was quiet in a way that worried me. Not the comfortable silence from the Public Garden. This was heavier. Weighted.
“I need to tell you something,” I said.
She looked at me, and I saw her brace herself. Like she was expecting bad news.
“The Times interview.”
“I know. You told me.”
“I know you know. But I want to talk about it. Really talk about it.” I stopped walking, and she stopped with me, the river gray and slow beside us. “This is a big deal for me. This could change everything.”
